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Feds raided Rocky Flats 25 years ago, signaling the end of an era

Rocky Flats was once the site of the a nuclear weapons production facility, May 29, 2014. This June will be 25 years since the FBI raided Rocky Flats.
(RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

ROCKY FLATS — In 1989, Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. The anti-Soviet Solidarity movement pushed for power in Poland. One million Chinese in Tiananmen Square demanded reform. And Colorado was seeing the end of its own extraordinary Cold War chapter at Rocky Flats, 16 miles northwest of Denver.

The Cold War site, which operated continuously from 1952 to 1989, was the Denver area's largest industrial plant, with 4,000 men and women manufacturing plutonium fission cores used to detonate U.S nuclear bombs.

Many of the 40,000 who worked at Rocky Flats over the decades to create a nuclear deterrent became casualties of the Cold War — with diseases caused by exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals.

It wasn't until January of this year that the government fully recognized their sacrifices with a special designation and new benefits. "Rocky Flats was nothing but a fancy machine shop ... in what was then the middle of nowhere. But we had machining capabilities that nobody else had," said Scott Surovchak, Rocky Flats legacy site manager for the Department of Energy.

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Workers here, sprawling over 800 structures on a top-secret 6,500-acre federal reservation, could drill out the center of a length of stainless steel wire thinner than a human hair to create tubing, Surovchak said. To say precision was required in making nuclear components doesn't capture it.

They worked in plutonium, uranium, beryllium, americium and other highly dangerous metals and chemicals.

But production would halt in December 1989 as the FBI executed its search warrant. Nuclear production would briefly resume the next year, then finally terminate in 1993, after President George H. W. Bush canceled the W-88 Trident Warhead Program in 1992.

A massive environmental cleanup would ensue as America's nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, dismantled in 1991, ground to a halt.

"The 'raid' didn't end Rocky Flats," Surovchak said.

"We ran out of a mission," he said. "Our main bad guy fell apart. We broke the Soviets. And we essentially went into a mothball situation."

The new mission was cleanup and closure.

Most of Rocky Flats today is a wildlife refuge. The DOE transferred more than 4,000 acres of its peripheral lands — its "buffer zone" — to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2007. DOE kept behind locked gates the site's hot buried heart — 1,309 acres of largely cleared land called the Central Operable Unit — for testing and treatment of the remaining immovable contamination.

The raid 25 years ago was the first time two federal agencies had assailed a third, according to University of Colorado associate journalism professor emeritus Len Ackland.

"Why was there a raid? It was very political. The symbolism of the raid was big," said Ackland, author of "Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West."

"When Rocky Flats started production, there was no EPA, no environmental laws — not until the 1970s," Ackland said.

The DOE's position was that it was exempt for national security reasons, he said. Then the highest echelons of the U.S. government signaled that national priorities were changing — to balance security interests with environmental protection.

"The raid burst into the public consciousness with headlines about midnight dumpings and burnings based on search affidavits," Ackland said. "The raid succeeded in demonizing the plant in a way that hadn't happened before, not even with the 1969 fire."

That plutonium fire sent toxic smoke wafting over the Denver metro area. But outside of a small army of protesters who frequently gathered outside the plant, public awareness of Rocky Flats remained dim before the raid.

"It was a very choreographed 'raid,' " Surovchak said.

If DOE higher-ups hadn't known beforehand about the raid, Surovchak said, "our guys would have met them with automatic weapons, and a lot of those agents would have ended up dead."

DOE security was ready to defend its large stockpile of plutonium. Materials were protected by armed guards, Surovchak said. Signs announced: "Deadly force is authorized." But most Rocky Flats workers and managers weren't forewarned about "Operation Desert Glow," and some found themselves making copies of documents at gunpoint or returning to cubicles wrapped in yellow crime-scene tape.

Rocky Flats was added to a list of high-priority Superfund sites. A new contractor, EG&G, assumed management in 1990.

DOE's contractor, Rockwell International Corp., pleaded guilty in 1992 to 10 environmental crimes and paid an $18.5 million fine.

"Every time we met with the EPA, they treated us like criminals," said Surovchak, who came to Rocky Flats in 1992.

It would take more than 10 years, until 2005, and $7 billion for contractor Kaiser-Hill to clean up the site — including demolition of more than 800 structures and transport of more than 120 tons of materials to nuclear waste storage facilities around the region.

Remaining contaminated soil and concrete is entombed in the Central Operable Unit. The DOE, EPA and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment all state in stacks of reports that the public's limited exposure to contaminants at the site has not posed a significant health risk and that, outside the Central Operable Unit, Rocky Flats is ready and safe for all uses.

During one of the most difficult cleanups in U.S. history, worker numbers swelled at Rocky Flats to a peak of about 8,000. Some estimates of subcontractors brought the total closer to 12,000. But the numbers quickly dwindled.

Chuck Sisk's father helped build Rocky Flats. He himself worked at Rocky Flats from 1990 until 2004, first as an accountant and auditor. In the last five years, he packed and shipped out canisters of plutonium as the plant emptied its inventory.

Sisk suffered two exposures. Just over three years ago, he developed liver cancer and underwent a transplant operation, all covered by insurance through Kaiser-Hill. He has no regrets, he said.

"I was well-paid. I was well-informed," the 67-year-old Sisk said. "Rocky Flats has been a part of my family from the early 1950s on. It was a necessary evil. It was a requirement of the time."

For Rocky Flats workers and a substantial percentage of the 700,000 Americans nationwide who worked from 1942 until now to build, and maintain, a nuclear arsenal, the toll has been high.

Those who have become very ill believe, and Congress agreed in 2001, that their cancers, berylliosis and other respiratory ailments are likely a result of their exposure at work to radiation and toxic chemicals.

Since 2001, the federal government has been providing monetary compensation and medical benefits to former nuclear and uranium workers. But the burden of proving that those illnesses were occupational fell to the workers, who had to reconstruct personal histories of exposure to receive compensation. Records often were lost or scattered — some say intentionally destroyed.

Back at Rocky Flats, Surovchak is now the last DOE man standing. Another DOE contractor, the S.M. Stoller Corp., has a dozen workers here monitoring and treating water.

"It's getting very hard to remember what it was like," Surovchak said, looking around at rolling tallgrass prairie dotted with deer and elk. A few tall evergreens stand out in a straight line — "the Lady Bird Johnson trees" that federal installations were required to plant in the 1960s. They used to line up along buildings, now gone.

Behind locked gates, a rutted dirt road is what remains of what was, in places, a five-lane paved highway. An old rail line is idle. Only a few scattered sheds and water-treatment and testing sites, outfitted with solar arrays, interrupt a natural-looking vista.

The loudest noises when Surovchak's SUV stops rumbling is the trill of a redwing blackbird and complaint of a killdeer protecting her nest.

Woman Creek is rerouted around one of the few remaining waste-containment ponds. The scars of emptied ponds and their breached dams eventually will disappear as vegetation grows to cover them, Surovchak said.

A free public three-day event, "Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years After the Raid," has been slated by the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Rocky Flats Institute and Museum.

Opening night Friday will feature "Personal Memories of the June 6, 1989, Raid," with University of Colorado associate journalism professor emeritus Len Ackland, 41-year Rocky Flats worker Jack Weaver, environmental activist LeRoy Moore and Charlie Church McKay, whose family lost land to the federal government for the plant site.

A "Raid in Retrospect" panel 10 a.m. Saturday morning will feature former Gov. Roy Romer, former FBI agent Jon Lipsky, former U.S. Rep. David Skaggs, Kristen Iversen, author of "Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats," and others.

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